Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (77 page)

Though the term
genocide
in fact has wide application, it is often thought to refer only to the Holocaust. People who associate themselves with victims will wish to define past crimes as
genocide
, thinking that this will lead to recognition of the kind awarded to the Holocaust. Meanwhile, people associated with states that perpetrated a genocide resist the term with great energy, because they believe that its acceptance would be tantamount to acceptance of a role in the Holocaust. Thus, for example, Turkish governments resist the classification as genocide of the mass killing of a million or more Armenians during the First World War.

A final problem arises from a known political modification of the definition. The Soviets made sure that the term
genocide
, contrary to Lemkin’s intentions, excluded political and economic groups. Thus the famine in Soviet Ukraine can be presented as somehow less genocidal, because it targeted a class, kulaks, as well as a nation, Ukrainians. Lemkin himself regarded the Ukrainian famine as genocide. But since the authors of the policy of starvation edited his definition, this has been controversial. It is remarkable that we have the legal instrument of genocide; nevertheless, one must not forget that this particular murder statute was co-drafted by some of the murderers. Or, to put the matter less moralistically: all laws arise within and reflect a certain political setting. It is not always desirable to export the politics of that moment into a history of another.

In the end, historians who discuss genocide find themselves answering the question as to whether a given event qualifies, and so classifying rather than explaining. The discussions take on a semantic or legalistic or political form. In each of the cases discussed in this book, the question “Was it genocide?” can be answered: yes, it was. But this does not get us far.

The peoples of the bloodlands functioned in a world of daunting linguistic complexity. Most of the victims described here knew or had regular contact with two or more languages, and many of them were bilingual or trilingual. Broader histories of Europe involve problems of transliteration, since words from languages written in non-Roman characters must be rendered in Roman characters in English. The problem arises not with languages such as French, German, Polish, or Czech, which are written in Roman characters with more or less familiar diacritical marks. But Yiddish and Hebrew are written in Hebrew characters, and Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian are written in Cyrillic alphabets.

For each of these languages there are competing systems of transliteration, each with its advantages and disadvantages. To make matters worse, many of the people and places discussed in this book were known by different names in different languages written with different characters. So there might be a dozen legitimate ways, for example, to spell the name of a Jew from Ukraine in English. For many readers, the people and places discussed in this book will be unfamiliar enough without the burden of the more elaborate solutions to the transliteration problem. The risk with too much precision is that people and places become more rather than less exotic.

I have generally given names in simpler and more familiar forms rather than those that correspond perfectly to transliteration. I spell Russian surnames ending with a double
ii
just that way, partly so that readers can tell the difference between Russian surnames (ending with
ii
), Ukrainian surnames (ending with
yi
), and Polish surnames (ending with
i
). I usually give city names in an English form if one is familiar, so Warsaw rather than Warszawa and Kiev rather than Kyïv. All of the cities were spelled differently by different inhabitants at any given time—and at different times fell under different rulers with different official topographies. I tend to favor current English spellings, although I make exceptions when it would seem absurd not to do so. Cities in the Soviet Union had a tendency to change names; I use the names under which they were known at the time. Thus famine and terror strike Stalino (not Donetsk) in the 1930s and the German Sixth Army is destroyed at Stalingrad (not Volgograd) in 1942. I try to refer to cities by the same name throughout the book, although in certain cases where boundaries moved and populations were transferred (Lwów/Lviv, Wilno/Vilnius) this would have been too distorting. In citations I give the name of the author as it appears in the cited work, even though this means that some authors’ names will be spelled different ways in different citations. In the notes and bibliography I transliterate more precisely than in the main text, following simplified versions of the Library of Congress guidelines. These are all matters of judgment; readers with experience in these problems will understand the impossibility of avoiding certain compromises. Translations, except where otherwise noted, are my own.

ABSTRACT

The killing in the bloodlands took five forms. First, Stalin undertook
modernization
by way of the self-colonization of his Soviet Union. The Soviets created a vast system of labor camps known as the Gulag, collectivized agriculture, and built factories, mines, and canals. When collectivized agriculture led to hunger, this was blamed on particular groups, primarily the Ukrainians. More than five million people starved to death in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, most of them in Soviet Ukraine. The hunger was caused by collective agriculture, but the starvation was caused by politics.

Then the Soviets effected a
retreat
into terror. In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, the Soviet leadership identified peasants, the victims of collectivization, as the primary threat to Soviet power. People who had survived hunger and the Gulag were shot. At the same time, the Soviet leadership defined certain national minorities as enemies. Nearly seven hundred thousand people were recorded as executed in the Terror, although the true number may be somewhat higher. These people were disproportionately agricultural laborers and Soviet Poles.

In 1939, the Soviets and the Germans invaded Poland together, and carried out a policy of
de-Enlightenment
. Reasoning from different ideologies, but drawing similar conclusions, the Germans and Soviets killed some two hundred thousand Polish citizens between 1939 and 1941, disproportionately the educated people who represented European culture and who might have led resistance. When the Soviets executed the 21,892 Polish officers and others at Katyn and four other sites in spring 1940, they were mirroring a German killing campaign that was going on at the same time. The Soviets and Germans also deported about a million Polish citizens at this time, swelling the Soviet and the German camp systems. The Germans put Polish Jews in ghettos, in the anticipation that they would all be deported. Tens of thousands of Jews died of hunger and disease as the ghettos become improvised labor camps.

After the Germans broke the alliance and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the two enemies killed civilians in a pattern of
belligerent complicity
. In German-occupied Soviet Belarus the Soviets encouraged partisan activity, and the Germans executed more than three hundred thousand people in return. These mass killings had little to do with reprisals in any conventional sense. By the end the Germans were shooting Belarusian women and children as an encumbrance, and taking the men as slave laborers. In Warsaw, Soviet forces first encouraged a Polish uprising and then watched, without involving themselves, as the Germans killed more than one hundred thousand Poles and then destroyed the city itself.

Hitler imagined a
colonial demodernization
of the Soviet Union and Poland that would take tens of millions of lives. The Nazi leadership envisioned an eastern frontier to be depopulated and deindustrialized, and then remade as the agrarian domain of German masters. This vision had four parts. First, the Soviet state was to collapse after a
lightning victory
in summer 1941, just as the Polish state had in summer 1939, leaving the Germans with complete control over Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, western Russia, and the Caucasus. Second, a
Hunger Plan
would starve to death some thirty million inhabitants of these lands in winter 1941-1942, as food was diverted to Germany and western Europe. Third, the Jews of the Soviet Union who survived the starvation, along with Polish Jews and other Jews under German control, were to be eliminated from Europe in a
Final Solution
. Fourth, a
Generalplan Ost
foresaw the deportation, murder, enslavement, or assimilation of remaining populations, and the resettlement of eastern Europe by German colonists in the years after the victory. Living space for Germans was to be dying space for others.

When the Soviet Union defended itself and no lightning victory could be won, Hitler and the German leadership adapted the three remaining plans to the new situation, killing about ten million people, which was fewer than originally planned. The
Hunger Plan
was abandoned in its original conception, and applied only to areas under total German control. Thus a million people were purposefully starved in besieged Leningrad and more than three million Soviet prisoners of war died of starvation and neglect. As the war continued, the Germans began to use prisoners as forced laborers, rather than allowing most of them to starve. The grand colonial scheme of
Generalplan Ost
could not be implemented without a total victory, which was not forthcoming. It was tried in areas of occupied Poland, where Poles were deported to create space for German racial colonies. Its essential concept was also visible in the German decision to destroy the city of Warsaw physically in response to the uprising of summer 1944. In the cases of both the
Hunger Plan
and
Generalplan Ost
, plans for mass killing had to be scaled back and delayed. The general goal of colonization was never abandoned.

The
Final Solution
, by contrast, was implemented as fully as possible. It was originally to take place after the war. As it became clear in the second half of 1941 that the war was not going according to plan, Hitler made clear that he wanted a Final Solution to be effected immediately. By then, four versions of a Final Solution by deportation had been proposed and found to be impracticable. The invasion of the Soviet Union, and its failure, demonstrated how the Jews could be removed from Europe: by mass murder. Einsatzgruppen originally tasked with eliminating political enemies were used to shoot Jews. Battalions of German Order Police originally tasked with patrolling the conquered Soviet Union were used in massive killing actions. By December 1941, when Hitler made clear that he expected all of the Jews under German control to be exterminated, a new technique of mass murder was available. Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide, used first in a “euthanasia” program, was adapted for use in gas vans in the occupied Soviet Union, and then in permanent gassing facilities in occupied Poland. To the labor camp at Auschwitz was added a death factory, where hydrogen cyanide rather than carbon monoxide was used as the agent of killing. The Jews of occupied Poland, already gathered into ghettos for deportation, were instead sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and gassed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing is punctuated solitude; the pleasure of finishing a book is acknowledging those who helped it take form.

Krzysztof Michalski and Klaus Nellen of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna forced me to specify the original thought. Thanks to the work-shops organized by the Institute within the project “United Europe/Divided Memory,” I enjoyed the company of several dozen outstanding historians in meetings in Vienna and at Yale University. I drafted the manuscript at Yale, my scholarly home, in the company of colleagues who set very high standards; and then rewrote the book during a stay at the IWM, made productive by the efforts of its staff, especially Susanne Froeschl, Mary Nicklas, and Marie-Therese Porzer. I am appreciative of my sabbatical year from Yale, and especially of the consideration shown by Laura Engelstein as chair of the Department of History. Ian Shapiro and the Macmillan Center at Yale supported my research. The competence and cheer of Marcy Kaufman and Marianne Lyden allowed me to balance administrative duties at Yale with research and teaching.

During the conception and drafting of this book, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by generous and talented graduate students at Yale. Some of them took part in demanding seminars on the subjects of the book, and all of them read draft chapters or discussed the book with me. I appreciate their work, their frankness, their good humor, and their intellectual company. Particular thanks go to Jadwiga Biskupska, Sarah Cameron, Yedida Kanfer, Kathleen Minahan, Claire Morelon, and David Petrucelli. The students and I could not have held our seminars, and I could not have researched this book, without the marvelous collections of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and the assistance of Tatjana Lorkovic and William Larsh of its Slavic Reading Room. Two outstanding Yale then-undergraduates, Beth Reisfeld and Andrew Koss, also helped me with aspects of the research. I cannot imagine Yale, let alone taking up a project of this sort in New Haven, without Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Stefanie Markovits, and Ben Polak.

A number of friends and colleagues put down their own work in order to read chapters of mine, to my great benefit. They include Bradley Abrams, Pertti Ahonen, Pavel Barša, Tina Bennett, David Brandenberger, Archie Brown, Christopher Browning, Jeff Dolven, Ben Frommer, Olivia Judson, Alex Kay, Ben Kiernan, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Mark Mazower, Wolfgang Mueller, Stuart Rachels, Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Will Sulkin, Adam Tooze, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Lynne Viola, and Iryna Vushko. Dieter Pohl and Wendy Lower read considerable portions of the manuscript. Nancy Wingfield kindly read and commented upon an entire draft. So did Marci Shore, who sets an example of humane scholarship that I wish I could match. It goes without saying that readers did not always agree with my interpretations. Critique helped the manuscript enormously; the responsibility for its flaws is mine.